The revival of Sandi Toksvig’s Bully Boy at St James Theatre is beautifully
designed and filled with remarkable performances, writes Jane Shilling.

There was a standing ovation from the first-night audience for the revival of Sandi Toksvig’s Bully Boy, the debut production at the newly opened St James Theatre, whose exhilarating design includes a vertiginously raked auditorium and an upstairs restaurant reached by an impossibly glamorous grey marble staircase.

Toksvig’s play has a plangent newsworthiness after the recent deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, and the “green on blue” attack in which a 29-year-old sergeant and an 18-year-old private soldier of the Yorkshire Regiment were killed by an Afghan policeman.

Bully Boy examines the developing relationship between a young private, Edward Clark (Joshua Miles), who is being investigated by a military police officer, Major Oscar Hadley, after an incident in Iraq or Afghanistan — the place is unspecified – in which a local woman was shot and her eight-year-old son, Omar, thrown down a well.

Major Hadley, played by Anthony Andrews, is a patrician Falklands veteran confined to a wheelchair (he implies to Clark that he was wounded on active service), who has flown to the frontline to establish the facts of the incident.

Having questioned the rest of Clark’s platoon, he turns his attention to the defensive 18-year-old from Burnley. As Hadley and his witnesses return from visiting the scene of the incident, their convoy detonates a roadside bomb. In the ensuing carnage Clark saves Hadley’s life, but he is left the sole witness to Omar’s death. By degrees a strong sympathy develops between the men, whose feelings about the pity and terror of war prove to be more similar that either of them could have imagined.

Some aspects of Toksvig’s drama require a certain suspension of disbelief – the flying out of a disabled Falklands veteran to a forward operating base; the notion that there was drunken mutiny aboard the troopship Hermes, aboard which Hadley was returning from the Falklands to Britain – not to mention the startling final tragic twist.

In a note on the text, she writes that Bully Boy “poured out of my head”, driven by her rage and horror at the legacy of war. These are noble sentiments, but not in themselves sufficient to construct a convincing dramatic argument.

But Patrick Sandford’s direction is tightly disciplined, Simon Higlett’s Patrick Caulfield-esque design, with its reeling, off-true angles, is starkly beautiful, and the performances by Anthony Andrews and Joshua Miles are remarkable: filled with energy and utterly committed, they lend rather more conviction to Toksvig’s emotionally expansive but unfocused play than it deserves.